Teaching Japanese and reading requires students to read a wide variety of texts. However, to determine the kind of texts to read, it is necessary to know not only the classification of texts based on expert knowledge but also the way readers perceive and classify texts. This study explored how readers perceive stories, according to genre ( i.e., the cognitive genre ). First, we conducted a survey asking readers what tags describe the content of stories. We then conducted another survey asking which stories readers would recommend to read and which tags were applied to the stories. Throughout the study, we showed that, in addition to genres that are applied to popular works, genres that are seldom read are independently recognized. In the analysis of the relationship of tag, we discussed similarity and exclusivity of each genre. Although these characteristics of cognitive genre have not received much attention in previous genre studies, we believe that they provide useful insights into material selection in education.
